Breezeblock / 7 Purchases

The most recent Breezeblock show starts with Midnight In A Perfect World, and goes on to feature a bloody amazing white label track by Knifehandchop and a live mix by Kieran Hebden.

Django’s got 10% off all used CDs and 15% of all new CDs, plus free shipping worldwide for over US$25 worth of new CDs. I ordered:

  • Soundmurderer: Wired For Sound
  • Edan: Primitive Plus
  • The Decemberists: Castaways And Cutouts
  • Six By Seven: The Things We Make
  • DJ Spooky: Riddim Warfare
  • Aereogramme: Sleep And Release
  • Doctor Octagon: Doctor Octagonecologyst

Thank God for the Internet. There is only so long I can subsist on MTV and shitty local radio.

Arranging Shelf Music To Suit Head Music

And now the CDs. Brilliantly handy shelf inserts from IKEA have been installed and a provisional arrangement is in place, although it’ll have to be tweaked again when my boxes finally arrive from England with the rest of the CDs.

The Arrangement of CDs is a difficult matter. I could go on and say it isn’t just one of your holiday games, but then I’d have to apologize to T.S. Eliot, and I am adamant that I owe that man NOTHING after struggling through The Waste Land. But where was I? Ah yes, I was being a total nerd. Onwards.

The thing is, the most obvious way to arrange CDs is alphabetically, but that seems to assume the arrangement’s meant to facilitate the locating of a CD I already know I want to listen to, and how often does that happen? Sometimes I don’t realize how much I wanted to listen to a CD until I’m two thirds of the way through. I want an arrangement scheme to detect the music in the back of my head and tell me what it is.

To this end, some sort of genre-based classification seems more suitable (insert obligatory “of course I know you can’t just force music so rigidly into genres and anyone who insists on this needs a laxative pronto, but it’s just convenient, okay?” disclaimer), but that can entail fairly tough decisions. Do I put Elliott Smith under indie pop or singer/songwriters? Should I separate UK hip-hop and US hip-hop? Does The Cure belong with “sound-of-the-80s” or post-punk? Do I even really, I mean really know what the hell post-punk actually is?

While doing this, I’ve been listening to CDs I haven’t heard in a long time, hoping to whittle out deadwood to sell in order to finance future purchases. Some of it’s fairly obvious, like the shiny circle of turd that is the Manic Street Preachers’ This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, and Beth Orton, who I once liked but now find rather dull, but the search through the less obvious candidates has turned up some fairly pleasant discoveries. Unconditionally Guaranteed 2 (an Uncut compilation) has Prettiest Thing (The Creatures) and My Morphine (Gillian Welch), which I can’t believe I didn’t notice when I first got the album in ’99. Your Sweet Voice, from Matthew Sweet’s Girlfriend is the sort of saccharine I hate from most other people except Matthew Sweet, who somehow gets away with it. Unfortunately, as much as I tried to like REM’s Up, it still blows. Sorry, guys.

Old Friends

Boxes and dust have been the order of the day, or rather, the order of the early morning hours between midnight and six, which is when I do the most of anything useful.

My family moved house while I was in London, and I’ve been going through the boxes from the old house bit by bit. I’m doing books first, deciding which ones actually get to live on shelves in the new room, and which ones get consigned to a box high up in a cupboard. It’s not always easy. Dealing with stuff at home is always immensely more complicated than in England, because here I have to make decisions about the accumulated sentimental junk of twenty years rather than four.

Childhood books are an issue. Some books get Shelf Status with little or no agonizing involved: the Narnian Chronicles, which I really must reread now adulthood informs me that Aslan’s meant to represent more than just a really noble lion; the Borribles books, certainly the darkest and bloodiest children’s books I’ve ever read, but also the most gripping and imaginative by far. But what about the Roald Dahls? Do I concede that I only reread them once every couple of years, and box them up, or do I grant them a precious place just because we go waaaaay back? And if I let the Roald Dahls onto the Shelves, how can I then deny space to the Dick King-Smiths, the Joan Aikens, the Enid Blytons, the E. Nesbits, the Colin Danns, the Judy Blumes, the Nancy Drews? How can I, with a clear conscience, banish I Am David and Malgudi Days and The Secret Garden and My Side Of The Mountain and White Fang and Grimble to the Box of the Unloved and Abandoned?

Faced with difficult decisions like these the other night, I dealt with the situation like an adult. I piled the books back in the boxes, found my old collection of Asterix comics, and read them till 6 AM, at which point my mother woke up for work, saw the light under my door, came in horrified, and nagged me into bed.

Post-Masters Bliss

And today it all ended. I wrote my last sentence in my last Masters exam, hoped fervently it would actually be my last Masters exam (last week’s exam was very, very bad. I might fail), freaked out with Gwen a bit about the toughness of the paper and scooted off feeling like I had wings on my heels.

Made a beeline for Gramophone. I haven’t bought a CD in way too long. Found DJ Spooky’s Under The Influence in the used section for S$7.99, and snapped it up goggle-eyed. Was delightfully distracted in Tang’s for the next few hours (note to non-Singaporeans: this is not the orange kryptonite you drank when you were a kid, it’s a department store), and bought shoes and a top. Would have bought a second pair of shoes except for the fact that they made farting noises when I was trying to walk in them.

Met Luke and Yuping for dinner and extended chat. Walked home from the bus-stop by the spooky route because I was feeling inVEENcible. Came to my room and put on the DJ Spooky, which is a daaaaamn fine mix album, great tunes, great flow, great mixing, or admittedly it might just be because I’m feeling great.

You know how you hear a song again when you haven’t heard it in a while and you suddenly wonder how on earth you went all that time without listening to it? Saul Williams’ Twice The First Time is on this album. I’m turning it up, Saul is off on his “and I be riding on the wings of eternity like HYAH! HYAH! Sh-clack-clack, GET ME THE FUCK OFF THIS TRACK!” trip, and now the beat kicks in, now I’m remembering how even Alec (not exactly a fan of what he calls my “hippety-hoppety music”), bought Xen Cuts almost on the strength of this track alone, now I’m hearing Saul say “Not until you listen to Rakim on a rocky mountain-top have you heard hip-hop,” and I’m thinking, Benny? Let’s climb Mount Kinabalu and bring some Rakim.

Junior Senior Whatever

What the hell does it matter that Junior is straight and Senior is gay, and why does it seem impossible to read anything ever written about the band without this fact mentioned? Is it meant to be special in some way that a gay person and a straight person are friends, and work together? For all I care, Junior could be the president of Hitler Youth and Senior could be a one-legged homosexual Jewish gypsy, and this still wouldn’t be enough to compensate for the fact that their music is shit.

Senorita Sucker

Senorita is a perfect example of how production and marketing can compensate for just about anything these days. Take mediocre song, imbue with mild catchiness by way of Neptunes beats, stir in some sultry honeys in clingy dresses gyrating to a song which isn’t particularly danceable in the first place, finally and most importantly add Justin Timberlake, and suckers like me will still be rooted to the screen every time it’s on.

Excerpt: The Singapore Story: Memoirs Of Lee Kuan Yew

I may have had to wait four years to wrestle The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew away from the rest of my family, but at least I’m finally reading it. It’s great. Here’s a passage:

“By his unpredictable and inconsistent twists and turns, Marshall had alienated not just myself and the Liberal Socialists, but his key Labour Front members. His wanting to restart the talks to save himself was too much for them. “You cannot eat your own vomit,” as one Liberal Socialist delegate put it in vivid Hokkien. Half an hour into the meeting, Marshall knew that if he tried to resume negotiations, he would have to do so on his own. He had overplayed his hand and was isolated.

That night, he went to a performance of Madam Butterfly with Lennox-Boyd and Lady Patricia Boyd, and then on to a Spanish restaurant to dine to the tune of guitars and the stamping feet of flamenco dancers. Meanwhile, I decided to stop him from staging a recovery. At a press conference that same evening at Malaya Hall, I made it clear that the PAP would have nothing to do with a reopening of the conference. I said it was a ‘final, desperate attempt to hang on to office, a sign of incredible political ineptitude’, and rounded it off with ‘Never in the history of colonial evolution has so much humbug been enacted in so short a time by so erratic a leadership.’ “

A Bleak Future In Gambling

I admit it, I’m stuck in the past. I sit here and try to think of something to write, but because my current life is boring beyond belief, and generally involves little more than me sitting in front of this laptop typing exam notes about judicial politics in France, me sitting in front of the TV watching Beyonce’s (fine) ass, and me sitting at the dining table eating chicken rice, I need to go back to a time I had fun. I’ll tell you about Ireland.

We were there to go to the Galway Races. And according to a secret plan of Alec’s, to also make me go up in a very small plane and make some pretence of learning to fly it. I don’t think he was planning to tell me this until I was actually thundering down the runway bug-eyed, but James let it slip earlier in the day. Fortunately or unfortunately, my date with the deathtrap had to literally take a rain check when weather conditions were unsuitable for flying, but I’m sure he’ll find a way of bundling me on another one some time in the future.

The Galway Races turned out to be quite similar to the Wimbledon Greyhound Races, except the things running along the track were bigger, and the chicks were better dressed. The major point of similarity between my two experiences with gambling is that we lost every bet here too. In the biggest race of the day, I scanned the 22 horses that were running and one stood out to me: Nearly A Moose. “Guys? I like Nearly A Moose! How about Nearly A Moose, huh guys?” The general response was that me liking the name was all very well, but look at its mediocre track record. I bowed before those who I thought knew better, and bet on another horse. Guess who won with odds of 52-1.

Further reliving our creeping dejection is too painful. I turn now to our creeping drunkenness. On the way back from the races, we stopped at a number of pubs. I forget how many exactly. At some point I revealed to Alec’s organic farmer friends that he often sought out organic food in the supermarkets. This brought much ridicule for him and hearty chuckles of “Take it from us, organic farming is bollocks!” At some other point I was at the bar ordering a round when the giggling ten-year-old boy beside me asked me if I was single on behalf of the very drunk old man beside him. We left the last pub around 1.30 in the morning. The third farmer brother had to milk the cows at 6. When we stopped along the way home to drop his girlfriend off, he decided to follow her, and did so amid shouts of “But what about the cows?” Poor cows.

MC Misogyny

Continuing the shameless dearth of intellectual content on this website ever since I started studying for exams, I just wanted to say I love summer hip-hop videos. Lots of bared skin, abundant booty, dance routines that make the most of all of the above, and, of course, that indispensable ingredient of summer hip-hop (some would say all hip-hop, but that just means they don’t actually listen to enough of it): misogynism.

I want to make a mixtape and call it Misogynists’ Party. It will feature classic tracks such as Baby Got Back, Rumpshaker, Hot In Herre and that new masterpiece by Nelly, P.Diddy and Murphy Lee, Shake Your Tailfeather.